The Amazing Invisible Man
by frooit
Summary: Wherein Sands has never been more blind. ::in progress::
1. part one

****

THE AMAZING INVISIBLE MAN

You can't make the mistake that Sands likes hospitals. Likes them, or even remotely thinks they have a purpose, _whatsoever_. Period. He tells everyone that comes in, and everyone that goes out: I, quote, _fucking hate hospitals_.

The nurses that check his gauze and feed him pills know. The three doctors and a half that poke and prod and make him wince know. Visitors, patients, the rats in the walls: they all know.

And he does, he really fucking hates hospitals.

The smell, the feel, the voices. And if he still had his eyes (here's thanking whoever he doesn't at the moment) the bright lights, the white everything, dying people in wheel chairs, blood stains, waxed linoleum, the endless halls, rubber, steel.

Hospitals are unnatural purgatory. You're stuck until you realize you were dead to begin with.

He's sharing the room he's in with a perpetually wheezing no-name and the twenty-pieced family from some sadistic circle of Hell. Screaming kids, skidding shoes, clanking metal, rapid-fire Spanish. That, and completely despite that fact that he's unhinged enough as it is, can drive you mad.

Three steps to Crazy Town.

Step number one...

Get fucked over in Mexico.

Check.

Ten hours earlier he was in the back seat of a junky car, screaming over the wind whipping through the passenger window, and bleeding himself dry on the upholstery. Four hours out of Cuilacan and headed to wherever.

"You fucking ass-rammer! Close the window!"

"I can't! There is no window!"

"What!"

"There IS no window!"

So Jorge'd come back.

He'd been all the way down the street, was going to turn the corner, be done with Mexico and smoke cigars and live life, but he came back. Came walking right back and stopped before he caught the smell of death.

Death was Sands slumping against the wall his hand was braced. Death was Sands shaking all over, bleeding all over, stuck in a Mexican shoot-out Kodak moment.

"I'm going to bleed to death before you find the next gas station..."

"No you're not."

"Yes, I really think I am."

A long silence with wind tunnel background music. Sands was beginning to hope he did bled to death, and wasn't about to mention that he'd been waiting for something like it to happen ever since getting here. Mexico: crazy other-world land, with crazy other-world people. Just about anything can happen, it was a fluke that murder over fraud became number _uno_.

It's only because you can't go tip-toeing through cartel country and not get stung. Or shot. Or gutted. Or blown away. It just doesn't happen.

"Hey." Jorge, from somewhere in the driver's seat.

"What?"

"I think I see someone on the road..."

You know you're in a backwater hospital when they let you keep your clothes on and you're bleeding rivers from five different holes - all of which shouldn't be there.

Almost like they know what they're doing, they put you out. Enter drugs, fade to delirium. When you wake up, clawing to the surface of whatever, you feel like you've kissed the steel-toe of a boot, been kicked off the highest building, been run over, buggered with a cactus, and run over again for the sake of good measure.

Nothing didn't have an ache, a pain, a hemorrhage. His head was humming live wire, his back hurt, is fingers hurt, and his limbs were swollen voids and stabs of fire.

Plus. It was hot. One hundred and fucking inferno degrees.

So the bleeding might have stopped, so he wasn't going to die, but the gauze they pulled around his lack of eyes itched like a son of a bitch. It might have eclipsed every subtle voice, but when it came down to it... it meant adding new names and a place to his _Reasons to Engage in Massacre_ list.

An itch you couldn't scratch is just what Sands is.

Three steps to Crazy Town, step number two.

"Fancy meeting you here, El. Going our way?"

"El Mariachi?" Which is the sound of Jorge almost surprised.

"That's the one, we're best buddies." Sands trying to steady his voice around the reek of blood and the threat of figurative black out.

"Not best buddies. Nothing." El. Enough said.

"How could you tell without..." There's Jorge again.

"Pants."

"What?"

"His PANTS, you deafmook. He jingles like a bell to its cat."

"Oh."

"Yeah, _oh_, now can we get going? I can't feel my fingers."

Step number two is finding a free-willed, killing-machine mariachi that does what you want, but not when you need it.

Check.

Half the time he's actually awake, chances are someone else is too. And they're wheezing like a dying horse, and they're kids are running around, or making noise, or getting yelled at and probably pointing. He's shot for sight, obviously, but like the kids don't seem to grip, he's not deaf. He can hear the whole lot asking the nurses about him. The _hombre sin ojos_.

Man without eyes.

If his throat wasn't red and raw and packed with clingy, invisible cotton, he might say something. Freak the fuckers out. Tell the truth and say something like, _this is what happens if you stay here too long. Get out_.

He's been in Mexico going on two years, and regrets the second he thought it was the land of inopportune opportunity. Which is just what it is, and that's just what got him hooked. As in _line and sinker_. Images that might be real may be illusion.

It crossed his mind all of once: getting out. Call it inevitability, but he couldn't even if he'd really wanted to. The CIA has sharp claws, eyes on every crossing, and hungry teeth. His mobile never stopped ringing - questions here, questions there. Cell phone number one became quick friends with the street three windows vertical.

He rang them whenever after that.

"Don't let him fall asleep."

"What'd you say?" Sands even sounds far away and down a well to himself. His mouth tastes sour.

"If you fall asleep..." Jorge and manly guts cross once every blue moon.

"What the fuck? Speak UP."

"You fall asleep, _amigo_, you're dead."

"And you're fretting about this because... why?"

Enough with the dramatic pauses and not-so silent silences.

"Aww, no. You don't have a soft spot for me, do you? I'm flattered. The CIA would be grateful..."

"I was under the impression CIA doesn't like you." So maybe Jorge did have guts. Or just the hollow skull.

"If I wasn't shot up or having an _outrageous nicotine fit_, I'd _nut_ you."

El finally enters existence. "Nut?"

"Yeah," Sands tries easing off his arm and side, and fails, "Sure. Fuck, ow. Have a smoke?"

"No."

"Christ. Your parties suck wind, Jorge."


	2. part two

****

THE AMAZING INVISIBLE MAN

Lying in any one position, for any long length of time, doesn't only get uncomfortable, it gets tedious. Side one begins to ache, just a twinge, but it grows. It grows until you've got to undertake the flipping of your half-numb, half-comatose ass to the other side. The side that won't cramp up until three hours later, then the cycle can begin anew. Put it under _deranged tango_.

Keep in mind wrestling around open wounds that can and will ooze blood if you twist just right. He's got enough of them to be a problem. Cue reason for being on a hospital bed in the first place.

Right.

Right, yeah, yeah. Bed. Dump _bed _though, it's metal. Steel, he thinks, and icy. One thin, starchy layer of cotton between his ass and a solid something, like a morgue stretcher. The only thing is, the material isn't as starchy as it could be. Blood's smoothed it. The air's heavy and moist with it, and he suspects that's not just because of him.

__

Fucking hospitals.

"We have a saving grace..." Sands says it suddenly. Suddenly, because his head has been lolling around his shoulders, like his neck ran off, for the last hour and twenty minutes. El might have stanched the bleeding, against his better judgement, but Sands isn't out of the woods yet. When El looks now, Sands' head is tipped far enough to hide some of the blood on his face and mouth.

"And what's that?" Jorge asks.

"The cartel won't follow us right away."

Sands lifts his head slowly and continues.

"They had their head cut off. They're running around wildly, like chickens," he stretches the _wildly_ long, pausing to lick cracked lips," Until they miraculously grow another, which isn't too hard these days, they'll let us slide."

"That gives us long enough to...?"

"Fiddle dick around."

Jorge says something after that, a long-winded sentence, but it slides past Sands. Slips clean. His head's sliding further and further to the side. He thinks he can hear his name being called, but that might just be the wind.

He can't flex the fingers of his left hand. There was a doctor, or just a someone, that spoke one day, and he asked Sands to lift both his arms and bend his fingers. He sounded displeased when Sands couldn't do the last part.

They don't tingle or even burn if he tries. And he tries. It's become his new thing now that he can stay conscious for more than five minutes at a time. He harasses the nurses and tries. He howls and curses at El and tries. He tolerates Jorge and tries.

They're saying two more days. Two more and then they're out of here. He can't wait.

"Sands?"

He can hear the voice, it's the reacting part that's difficult.

"Sands? Hey."

Long pause.

"Dammit. I think he's passed out."

"What?"

"Stop the car. Stop it, pull over."

The car does, he can feel it lurch and stop on an incline. A gutter, a ditch. The side door doesn't open, instead someone from the front climbs to the back.

This is it. He's dying. He's dying and he can hear El scrambling to save him clear as polished fucking crystal. The springs in the seats, El's breathing, the sliding of fabric against fabric against skin. It sounds like sex.

He would have smirked.

For how many shoot outs El has been in, how many injuries he has seen or sustained, as bad or worse than this, he doesn't seem to know what to do.

"He needs a doctor," Jorge says, and his voice might have been concerned on its own, or it was just Sands' dying wish bleeding through.

That's when El shakes him. Actually rattles his brain back into his head. His breath catches, his lungs burn, he wheezes. He's not dying after all.

"Playing possum?"

"Fuck you and your inbred family, Jorge."

There's your third and final step to Crazy Town.

Take a dive and face your mortality.

Check.

Switch out hospital bed for motel bed. Switch out hospital hysteria for motel hysteria.

He remembers being told he was lucky the bullets didn't drive too deep. He isn't so sure about that. He still can't stand much on his own, he wobbles.

"You call this better?"

Sand is smart enough to know they won't leave him alone to his own devices, so someone's there, he just doesn't know who.

"I never liked you," he says, straining his ears.

It's the tipping of a chair he picks up first, then the footsteps, and finally the chains. He tries to keep himself from grinning too wide.

"Day or night?"

"Night."

"Where's your boyfriend?"

Dead air.

Not that he likes making the eye absence obvious, but the annoyed crackle in the air is more than enough to beat it down. He asks questions only because he knows it bugs El.

"What beaten down side of Mexico is this?"

"A side."

He's a little more aggravated than he thought he was, because he sneers. Sneers enough to disrupt the blood still on his face. The combination of heat and sweat hasn't let it congeal or dry, it meanders down his chin and into the collar of his shirt.


	3. part three

****

THE AMAZING INVISIBLE MAN

"Once upon a time, I had fingers that could work." Sands' voice is dry, fitting for Mexico and its longest mile and its sun-cracked wood and clay bones.

El's busy ignoring him and doing mariachi-type things. The slide of a rag or a shirt sleeve against solid mass, clicking, thudding, hollow. He's been at it for fifteen minutes. Sands, ticking the seconds away with the fingers he can't feel.

Probably polishing guns, or knifes, or anything just as easily snapped to his forehead and discharged. Short-lived itches of unease curdle into instant loathing.

As much he can tell, the room is small, tiny even. El doesn't feel any further away than a couple feet. The air is close, stuffy. Sick with generic cleaner the maids use to cover what goes down in these places.

"Once upon a time, I had you twisting around one."

El's racket doesn't break for his voice, "No. Not truly."

"I had you by the balls," Sands says. "You. Already dead, high on that hero vengeance, on a leash."

"Once upon a time, you were honourable?"

That sorta gets Sands. His eyebrows almost go up before he realizes that's a bad idea (eye sockets sore as all fuck, nerve-edged, concentrated burn). He tries to fist his fingers, impulsive, fails, and falls on licking his lips in the end.

"Flashback: I'm the depraved bad guy."

Sudden changes to guitar strings twanging. Sands turns. He's getting noise same as ever: signal a voice, a foot fall, a click - look to see who or what it is. Another impulse. Eventuality is him getting used to the blackness not lifting (like always sleeping never waking).

"So my hand's fucked sideways. I can't load a gun."

The distinct music of a gun being snapped and checked.

"You can't see anyway."

Sands tries to laugh. He gurgles around the saliva and leftover blood in his throat instead. Oh, the grace of it all.

"I seem to have this strange memory of a certain dick mariachi shrieking like an infant when he saw my," he knows El picks out the splinter-inch falter, "situation."

Step back to the car. To being on the road, and the light just failing, and Jorge just seeing the someone on the road. Then jump to Jorge pulling over. El heard Sands before he saw him, and when he saw him, he bit his tongue so hard he's still tasting hot metal.

"The doctor said nothing of your hand?"

"Oh, yes. And I'm just pulling your chain, ass-fuck. I've been able to wiggle my little finger this entire time. See?"

Sands lifts his left arm. The fingers don't budge, or twitch, they stay curled in at the palm. It sways. When he's put it back down, El closes the lid to his guitar case, takes a stride, snatches Sands' wrist, and hikes it into the air. He's twisting it sharp enough to justify the first _ow_.

"You feel that."

"Fucker! Christ, ow, _OW_!"

"You must not be trying hard enough." He doesn't just drop it, he _flings_ it at Sands and goes back to his corner and his guns and his Mexico.

You don't break bread with a guy you previously tried to play. Especially, and this has to be somewhere high on the list, if you're blinded, gutted, and left belly down in Mexico's graveyard beforehand. There's _Devious Weasel_ etiquette there. Like you're not expecting that soup to have a strange tang, or it to leave a sick twist in your throat, your skin, your stomach. Like it won't turn your insides out.

You're not so crazy you won't suspect poison.

"What is this?"

"Chicken noodle."

"What, from a can?"

Sands stirs the liquid in the bowl, the spoon scraping the bottom on every rotation. _Clank. Clank._

He has enough curiosity to bring the spoon, noodles and all, to his face. Smells like soup, probably looks likes soup, but does it, the question of questions, taste like soup?

"Buy yourself a new pair of pants, asswit. I'm not eating this."

Sands is a smooth-talker, a fast-thinker. He doesn't usually back into a situation he can't cheat, or purr, or persuade, or claw his way out of. Everyone's blind-sided, they'll tell you. It happens. But they always, _always_ ever forgot to tell Sands that it'd be literal.

"You're out-numbered..." Same cheap, one room motel; different room. "Out-numbered... Out-numbered... What do you do?"

Different room, different keys. Different bed. Let them play with Jorge's head and pin it on getting a jump on anyone sniffing around too close. Your cat and mouse, musical chairs.

"Fight."

Sands sighs. "Alright..."

"You're out of ammo, what do you do?"

"Fight."

Sands sucks his teeth. "Oh, good answer. But how about this one?" He doesn't just grin he radiates, "You're blind," and feels the edges of a headache coming on. "What do you do?

There isn't just silence anymore. It's _utter_ silence. It's so complete it crosses itself twice and comes back to slap you in the face.

"Fight." If Sands hadn't somehow expected how close the answer would come to his ear, it might have been a freak out.

"How are your fingers?" El says, like fucking _ash_. Sands wants to bite but doesn't.

"You haven't been sucking down the cigarillos again, have you?" He pries.

Skip corners, question to a question, change of subject, stay in control. It's a trick he used on his mother one too many times, you'd think she'd have seen through it in the end. _The end_ was what police called suicide.

"So?"

"They're just dandy, Mister El. Fuck off."

The one thing you usually know not to do with a blind, crazed, beaten-down, snake-in-the-grass gringo, is touch him. More than once. More than once in a week. In a month. Three months.

But here's El. And here's El touching. Him. The Amazing Invisible Man. Twice in a day. If you didn't expect the barrel to the forehead, the bullet, the snarl - you obviously had it coming. That's how it works.


End file.
